Folks,please comment. It takes effort to post these things. I thought these items were in the FAQ section,but they are not. Do an advanced search: type in "A large cider press" and George Wilson,and you can find it among the posts that will come up. Then,you can see the completed cider mill and cider press.
My boss had gone to England and had become very impressed with a giant cider press and apple mill he had seen at a cider maker's establishment in Sommerset. He had been after me for 2 or 3 years to figure out a way to reproduce these things.
Cider making was a very important occupation back then. Cider was their soft drink,and their hard drink,if they fermented it. They grew something like 3 dozen different cider apples at a nearby plantation back then. Anyone who was anyone kept a large keg of cider in their basement.
This was about 1983,and I was still the musical instrument maker,with a shop to run,and employees to look after. This was a major project,and I was not wanting to spend a year hand cutting threads for a screw this size. Threading the hole was also a very big hurdle.
I contacted the largest machine shop in Hampton,Va. about doing this job. They decided they wanted to make the nut with an INSERTED thread. That would look very unauthentic,and no doubt would crack to pieces and fall out.
I came upon a smaller,country machine shop that was in Gloucester at the time. They agreed to help with the job. I bought a beechwood log and had it taken there. You'd be surprised how crooked an apparently straight log can be,when it is gotten into a lathe! So,I got a log over 2' in diameter to be sure it would clean up at 16" diameter,which was the diameter of the large bulb on the end of the screw.
It is not possible to buy a dry log. No one lets them lay around a lumber yard long enough to get dry,as there is no money in it. They are soon sawn into lumber,and the lumber is then dried.
How do you keep a green log from splitting open as it dries? That was the big question.I decided that logs split open because the wood in the center of the log has no place to go as the log shrinks,getting smaller in its outer regions. It eventually pops wide open .There was much discussion about this problem with a few master craftsmen and the boss in his office. I decided the thing to do was drill a 2" diameter hole right down through the center of the log. In the years hence,this strategy has worked. The screw has never split open. I also coated the exterior of the FINISHED screw with liberal amounts of bees wax,leaving the center hole uncoated,so the screw would cry mostly from inside,keeping the threads from splitting.
I don't know how to get the pictures in order. In the first picture,you see I had sawn the end of the log square. This was so it could be gotten into a big 4 jaw chuck. In the 3rd picture,I had to chop the other end of the log down to a smaller diameter. The lathe would swing the log over its bed,but not over the cross slide. After we got the log onto the lathe with a fork lift,I had to make an initial very deep cut down the length of the log,so it would clear the cross slide. They had some very large,very old hand forged lathe bits that came in handy,and I was able to take a 4" deep cut just ahead of the cross slide. Then,I turned the log down to the 12" diameter of the threads,and freehand operated the cross slide to produce the large,curved,16" diameter bulb at the end.
In the closeup of cutting the threads,there is a router with a large,straight cutter clamped at a 45º angle cutting the 2" wide,6 thread per inch screws progressively deeper till the completed thread shape was made. Fortunately, proper wood threads(which are seldom found these days in wooden threads) are cut at 45º,making a 90º thread,rather than the 60º thread which you always see now,but which is really a metal thread type.
During this turning,the chips got about 2 feet deep,and I was actually working on my knees while controlling the lathe. I asked several times for the owner to get a guy to dispose of the chips. He finally did after about a week. By the time the screw was finished,as you can see,the chips had piled up again.
The picture of the screw standing vertical on a machine is a horizontal boring mill where I'm drilling two 5" diameter holes at 90º to each other,where tommy bars will be inserted to turn the screw in the press.
I am finally finished in one picture,giving a British salute.
This is as many pictures as I can post. I will have to post another thread on making the nut.
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